Abstract

In our original call for papers for this issue on ‘Revolutions’, we foregrounded our interest in reading work that documented revolutionary moments, movements or impulses, and that theorised the difference that gender makes both to revolutions themselves and to how we conceive of them. We were keen to highlight the ways that revolutions are gendered and also how our accounting of and for them makes and extends gendered meanings. As editors of this themed issue of Feminist Review, our concern was to think through what might constitute a ‘feminist revolution’, and what a feminist perspective on revolutions might inaugurate in analytical and political terms. The articles in the following pages make a key contribution to how revolution is conceptualised in relation to gender and the political, asking us to consider ways in which gender is always already part of the revolutionary process and struggle. Hence, these pieces urge us to consider the gendered politics of revolution as concept and practice, and to delve deeper into the figurations of masculinity and femininity that shape the idea of a revolutionary subjectivity.